Latest news from the trenches

A few months ago, Yann built MonProchainBus.eu, which allowed people living in or near Strasbourg
to find the nearest bus/tram stops and the next three arrivals.

Ever since, I thought it would be nice to have a native counterpart on my phone, so a few weeks ago I finally gave it a go, and used the occasion to experiment with RubyMotion, a tookit for building iOS apps in Ruby.

After a few hours of work scattered over the weeks, the app is finally live on the App Store and available for everyone. It focuses on one thing only at the moment: showing you the closest stations to you and the next arrivals. No directions, no custom address lookup: those will come, though. One step at a time :)

For the most part, I enjoyed using RubyMotion. I find it more elegant than Objective-C and the command-line workflow feels more natural to me than doing everything through Xcode. I can’t (yet!) vouch for its use in large-scale applications, but when it comes to experiments, prototypes, and small/medium apps, I can’t think of a reason not to go with RubyMotion.

We will keep improving both applications over time. If you live in or near Strasbourg and have ideas about how to improve the service, get in touch with us.

And if you are currently in another city that gives access to public transporations data, we would love to support it and expand beyond Strasbourg! Once again, let us know.

If you have questions or feedback, you can hit either Yann or me up on twitter. And no, this is not an April Fool’s joke :)